Trials And Troubles In Happy Valley

Hitting back:

All the same, Kinkade's running a one-man press office for the accused, feeding out-of-town journalists' allegations that Perez was arrested for petty larceny in 1975 and was also cited for receiving unemployment benefits while enrolled in the Police Academy in 1988. (Perez and police officials refuse to comment on the specific charges, saying the matters are being investigated internally.) "I've just taken a beating since this whole thing began," Perez told NEWSWEEK. He knows, however, how to hit back. Striding down the hallway of the county courthouse, the tall, leather-jacketed Perez cuts a formidable figure, his sidearm and handcuffs jingling on his belt. "You know," he says to a reporter, not slowing his pace, "you might just take a look at Bob Kinkade's record. He's been through the system a few times himself." That's true: Kinkade was twice tried on charges of molesting his stepdaughter. He was found not guilty on two charges, and the jury hung on three others.

The competing versions of reality--one from the authorities, the other from the accused-are fighting it out in the Roberson case. (The House of Prayer was one of the sites where the girl says she was abused.) In all, there are three named sources for the charges: Perez's foster child; a 18-year-old female friend of hers; and Linda Miller, 85, a parishioner who confessed to participating in group sex at the church, then recanted to a Spokane television station, saying Perez had forced her to implicate herself and the Robersons. But according to statements the two girls have given police, the pastor, his wife and other grown-ups forced them to have sex. In one incident, the 13-year-old claims, Roberson asked the girl to come into his shag-carpeted office just off the sanctuary. There, the pastor and three other adults raped her. "The pastor told the girl," prosecutors say in an affidavit, that "if she told what had occurred he would hurt or kill her or would come after her family and friends." Then, allegedly, Roberson said to the girl: "We're done. Pull up your pants and you can go."

Yet Roberson and his lawyers deny any of this ever happened. They claim it's a pay-back from Perez because the pastor was looking into whether the detective was railroading poor, uneducated people into jail--people, in fact, like Perez's foster daughter's parents, who sometimes attended Roberson's church. Such small-town coincidences could be the prosecution's undoing. The thinking is that the girl, to please her foster father, might embroider or fabricate allegations. Roberson's lawyers plan to make that potential conflict of interest their first line of attack.

Manufacturing charges:

Because physical evidence in sexual-abuse cases can be unreliable. taking either side requires equally large leaps of imagination. For the critics to be right that law-enforcement officers are manufacturing charges means believing there is collusion between police, prosecutors and social-service workers in the Wenatchee area's two counties. But it is also difficult to believe that a score of adults and children could have rowdy, frequent sex together for so long without being noticed. "None of it is true--nothing they have said about us," Roberson, sitting in jail, told NEWSWEEK. "And I know the Lord is going to allow us to be his instrument s in getting to the root of this." Such talk heartens Roberson partisans like Mary Sparks, who's certain the police have overreached. "There are a lot of very nice people here whose lives are being destroyed by this," says Sparks, an unemployed truckdriver who attends Roberson's 40-member church. Sparks had his two little gifts examined once the story broke; they were unharmed.